(Im)Personal Old Stuff

Blog Administration

Tuesday, August 23. 2005

When we lived in Toronto, we had great neighbours. I know that many people say that living in a big city means you never meet your neighbours, but I believe that is only true in the suburbs. When you live in the city (we were at Bathurst and St. Clair) and do every on foot or by transit, you tend to meet more people and see more interesting things than living in suburbia.

One such chance meeting was with a neighbour's visitor who was driving an extremely unusual car. A Daupline Electric.

Their website (Feel Good Cars) now seems to focus on a "new" car, the ZENN (Zero Emission, No-Noise). This is a small, completely electric commuter car with a limited speed and range. Ideal for inter-city driving.

But what I saw at my neighbour's, and what I really liked was the Dauphine Electric.

The Renault Dauphine was revealed in 1956, and was supposed to be called the Corvette, but there was another, somewhat more famous car released that year with that name so Renault renamed theirs to Dauphine.

It was a cute little unibody,32hp 4 door sedan with an electric drivetrain, produced until 1968.

The idea behind the Feel Good Cars Dauphine Electric (back in 2001) was to pick up some old Dauphines and retrofit them. Refurbished original car body's are the basis for the 'new' models. The drive line is retrofitted with modern electric propulsion & batteries.

I don't know if they are still available, but I sure liked the retro-styling. An in terms of environmental footprint, don't forget that one of the three R's is "reuse". And this, my friends, is an excellent example of reuse.

E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: